hospital mergers and quality of care

Hospital mergers may not be best for the patient Consolidation of hospitals and mergers between health systems may result in lower quality care, according to experts. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state law enforcement officials closely scrutinize proposed merger and acquisition deals to ensure the combined entity will not create a monopoly in a particular market.In light of recent trends, the FTC has been more critical of proposed deals, blocking potential mergers such as the one between “Vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws is more important than ever,” former FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez Hospital prices in monopoly markets were more than 15 percent higher than prices in areas with four or more competitors. We compare the quality of hospital care before and after mergers and acquisitions in California between 1992 and 1995.

Ten hospital merger and acquisition transactions involved healthcare organizations with net revenues of $1 billion or more in 2017.One of the largest deals announced in 2017 involved two health systems operating across most of the country.Source: Kaufman Hall Goals and responsibility for safety and quality are frequently unclear.”Healthcare organizations will need to carefully review their practices, procedures, and facility cultures during and after a merger to ensure that staff are adequately prepared and trained for new challenges.The jury is still out on whether hospital merger and acquisition deals will add value to healthcare. N Engl J Med.

Regardless, the evidence of hospital mergers on quality of patient care is mixed. Atypon 2020 May 7;382(19):1867. doi: 10.1056/NEJMc2001367.N Engl J Med.

Similar deals between like-sized organizations include the finalized merger between “Increasingly larger organizations are exploring mergers of equals in which an alignment results not in incremental change, but in transformative change for the demands of a transforming healthcare system,” “These changes include the ability to manage the health of populations, reduce the total cost of care, and introduce innovations such as precision medicine.”Hospitals are also busy acquiring physician practices to extend their reach into the community and capture more of the care continuum.Hospitals acquired 5,000 physician practices from July 2015 to July 2016 alone, a recent Physicians Advocacy Institute and Avalere Health Hospitals owned nearly 30 percent of physician practices by late 2016, accounting for a 107 percent boost in the number of hospital-owned practices since 2012.The recent acceleration of physician practice acquisitions also represented a doubling in the hospital ownership percentage over the previous four years.Hospitals and health systems are making merger and acquisition moves to implement value-based care.“The transition from volume to value and the corresponding move to population health management require major capital investments and sophisticated management expertise of the sort that may prompt even the most independent-minded hospitals and health systems to consider their consolidation options,” stated Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) in a 2016 Value-based care requires providers to control the costs and outcomes for an entire episode of care.

Differences in Performance between Acquired… Figure 1..

In fact, the study linked hospital mergers and acquisitions to a decrease in 30-day readmissions rates for acute myocardial infarctions, heart failure, and pneumonia of about 1 percent.However, it may take some time for organizations to realize the cost savings stemming from a hospital merger and acquisition. “Put differently, empirical literature does not support the argument that hospital mergers always, or even generally, improve quality” [15]. Accountable care organizations (ACOs) and other more advanced alternative payment models also call on providers to be responsible for the costs and outcomes of an entire patient population.Providers are joining a larger organization or adding other providers to their network to better understand a patient’s entire healthcare journey and gain insights on how to prevent costly services and conditions.Slightly over one-half of physicians (53 percent) in a 2016 Deloitte “Organizations are seeking new capabilities for a value-based, consumer-oriented health system, such as data analytics, care coordination across the continuum, retail or urgent care centers, and telehealth, among others,” Kaufman Hall’s Singh explained.“Through partnerships, healthcare organizations are seeking Generating the scale to succeed with value-based care is also key.

In a February 11, 2019 New York Times article, Austin Frakt , adjunct associate professor at Harvard T.H. Name must be less than 100 characters Studies thus far on the impact of mergers and acquisitions of hospitals have focused less on quality of care and more on costs, finding they lead …